Foul weather and a muddy pitch meant Denis Law’s double hat-trick didn’t count

Denis Law’s many wonderful achievements in club and international football were acknowledged following the Scot’s recent death.

Television showed many clips to his scoring feats with the two Manchester clubs, as well as Scotland, with particular reference to the part he played in the preliminaries in Man U becoming the first English team to win the European Cup, as the continent’s premier competition was then known.

Little was seen, however, of what he achieved on this day, 54 years ago. The reason could be that, while it was a remarkable scoring feat, what he did at Luton’s Kenilworth Road doesn’t appear in the record-books.

Law was in his first stint in the Man City colours, having transferred from Huddersfield, when he lined out against Luton in the Cup. It was a foul day, with rain lashing down, leaving the Kenilworth pitch was even worse than Derby County’s Baseball Grounds – mentioned here last week – at its muddiest.

There were doubts about the game going ahead, but when the rain stopped and a bit of blue sky appeared, it was decided to go ahead.

Luton would have been grateful – for just a while. Within a half-hour, they were 2-0 in front. But then Law took a hand. Just a minute after Luton scored their second, he was on the mark. He then scored another and before half-time completed the hat-trick.

It didn’t end with that. Not long into the second half, he made it four, then five, and with the skies opening once again completed his second hat-trick.

(Good as he is around goals, one of Law’s successors in the sky-blue, Erling Haaland, is never likely to achieve anything like that. If he does, his half-dozen are likely to count. Law’s didn’t.)

If the Luton pitch was mud-spattered at the start, it turned into a saturated ploughed field. It was said that in some places the water was ankle-deep, and where there wasn’t water you could grow spuds.

Left with no real alternative, the referee called a halt. And with his final blast of the whistle, Law’s record was gone to the wind.

That wasn’t the end of the story. The replay was fixed for four days later, Luton again playing at home. The sun was shining, but the pitch remained a challenge, the players constantly wiping the mud off their cogs.

Luton again went into a two-goal lead, and again Law pulled one back. But there was no comeback for City this time. Luton made it 3-1, and that was how it ended.

Law was still with United when City won the Cup for the first time in 14 years. Let’s jog a few greybeards’ memories by listing the 1969 team: Dowd, Book, Pardoe, Doyle, Booth, Oakes, Summerbee, Bell, Lee, Young, Coleman.

By sad coincidence, Tony Book, centre-half on that team and a player who gave real meaning to ‘teak-tough defender’, died within a few days of Denis Law.